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POPSRemembering the Past is Like Imagining the Future 'Everyone has heard that memories can be unreliable, but many of us don’t appreciate the extent to which that is true. It’s not the case that “real” memories are stored once and for all deep in the darkest recesses of the brain, and it’s just a matter of digging them up. False memories — conjured from any number of sources, from gradual embellishment to direct suggestion by others — seem precisely as vivid and real to us as accurate memories do. For a good reason: the brain uses the same tools to construct the memory from the available raw materials. A novel and a history book look the same on the printed page'
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POPSCan We Increase Our Intelligence? "It used to be believed that people had a level of general intelligence with which they were born that was unaffected by environment and stayed the same, more or less, throughout life. But now it’s known that environmental influences are large enough to have considerable effects on intelligence, perhaps even during your own lifetime"
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POPSA combination of nature and nurture Did the musicians perform better because they are naturally more sensitive to sounds, and thus more likely to study music? Or did their nervous systems change because they were exposed to music for more than a decade? We're all a combination of nature and nurture
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POPSMan, machine and in between Brain-implantable devices have a promising future. Key safety issues must be resolved, but the ethics of this new technology present few totally new challenges
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POPSFive Brain-Manipulating Technologies "oss Whedon's new show Dollhouse is about a secret organization that supplies mind-wiped sex ninjas to the rich. It's not set in the future because neuromanipulated technoslaves could exist today.
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POPSCoffee - I like coffee so much that I have tea for breakfast :-) One man's roller coaster history with coffee: "I like coffee so much that I have tea for breakfast: The first cup of the day in particular is so good that I’m afraid I won’t be able to properly appreciate it when I am half-asleep. Therefore, I celebrate it two hours later when I am fully conscious".
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POPSLearning Should Be Fun " if you can get out of the rut of right and wrong you free up a natural capacity for experience-led, curiosity-driven learning. Soon you'll be flying along again, experiencing the learning equivalent of the jogger's high, and all thanks to that chemical messenger dopamine and a brain that's evolved to find things out for itself, and feel good while doing it."
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POPSThe mind’s ability to adapt to the changing world " There’s no point in trying to hack apart the connections between the inside and the outside of the mind. Instead we ought to focus on managing and improving those connections. For instance, we need more powerful ways to filter the information we get online, so that we don’t get a mass case of distractibility. Some people may fear that trying to fine-tune the brain-Internet connection is an impossible task. But if we’ve learned anything since Clark and Chalmers published “The Extended Mind,” it’s not to underestimate the mind’s ability to adapt to the changing world. "
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POPS Where does the mind stop and the rest of the world begin? “Where does the mind stop and the rest of the world begin?” Most people might answer, “At the skull.” But Clark and Chalmers set out to convince their readers that the mind is not simply the product of the neurons in our brains, locked away behind a wall of bone. Rather, they argued that the mind is something more: a system made up of the brain plus parts of its environment.
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POPSThe questions facing our generation ' would it be so bad if the human race was slightly improved? What if a relatively simple procedure could make an individual and his or her offspring more compassionate, intelligent and thoughtful? Currently scientists are using gene therapy in an attempt to wipe out disease, but what if we could save many more lives by wiping out war instead though engineering humans to be less bloodthirsty, hateful and narrow-minded?
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POPS"The Call of the Mountain" "The Call of the Mountain" Arne Naess1-4 Documentary film on Norwegian eco-philosopher Arne Naess and the Deep Ecology movement, recorded partly at Tvergastein, Naess's mountain cabin on the Hardangervidda plateau. Arne Naess, Norwegian Philosopher, Dies at 96 -1-4
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POPSLearning Makes Itself Invisible The reason this occurs is because of two facts about the mind that are not widely appreciated. The first is that memory is not kept in a separate store away from the rest of the mind's functions. Although there are brain regions crucial to memory, the memories themselves are not stored separately from the regions which do perception, processing and output. Unlike a digital computer, your mind does not have to fetch stored information when it needs it, instead your memories affect every part of your perception and behaviour.
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POPSSpirituality, Makes Kids Happy "Personal aspects of spirituality (meaning and value in one's own life) and communal aspects (quality and depth of inter-personal relationships) were both strong predictors of children's happiness"
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POPSTips for Thinking from an Extraordinary Thinker Daniel Tammet is the author of two books, Born on a Blue Day and Embracing the Wide Sky, which comes out this month. He’s also a linguist and holds the European record for reciting the first 22,514 decimal points of the mathematical constant Pi. Mind Matters editor Jonah Lehrer chats with Tammet about how his memory works, why the IQ test is overrated, and a possible explanation for extraordinary feats of creativity.
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POPSWhy kindness has become our forbidden pleasure? "What is to be done? Nothing, many would say. Human beings are innately selfish and that is that. Newspapers bombard us with scientific evidence to back up this pessimism. We read about greedy chimpanzees, selfish genes, ruthless mate-selection strategies, even about meerkats - those famously cooperative creatures - who instead of looking out for their fellows spend most of their time "watching their own backs". Richard Dawkins of "selfish gene" fame lays it on the line: "Human society based simply on the gene's law of universal ruthless selfishness would be a very nasty society in which to live. But unfortunately, however much we deplore something, this does not stop it being true ..." Yet Dawkins does not despair: "If you wish, as I do, to build a society in which individuals cooperate generously and unselfishly towards a common good, you can expect little help from biological nature. Let us try to teach generosity "
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POPSWhy We Lie? Many animals engage in deception, or deliberately misleading another, but only humans are wired to deceive both themselves and others
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POPSMuch like love, hatred is often blind Religious and politically-based hatred: many religious and political wars that have occurred throughout history Terrorist attacks are almost always related to political arguments, religious disagreements or both. Religious and politically motivated atrocities have traditionally been inspired by greed, envy and fear.
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POPSHow the city hurts your brain One of the main forces at work is a stark lack of nature, which is surprisingly beneficial for the brain. Studies have demonstrated, for instance, that hospital patients recover more quickly when they can see trees from their windows, and that women living in public housing are better able to focus when their apartment overlooks a grassy courtyard. Even these fleeting glimpses of nature improve brain performance, it seems, because they provide a mental break from the urban roil
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POPSLess (Information) Is More When Benjamin Franklin's nephew Joseph Priestley found himself stumped by a complex life decision, he wrote his sage uncle for advice. In his 1772 letter of reply, Franklin described his own method for reasoning out complex problems, which he called "moral algebra." Divide a sheet of paper in half, he counseled his nephew, and make an exhaustive list of pros and cons. Then, over a couple days, weigh the pros and cons, and when a pro and a con seem of equal weight, strike them both out. What is left in the balance is the best answer. Such "balance sheet" calculation is still taught today as the most logical and systematic method for dealing with many of life's complexities. Kids are counseled to choose colleges and careers this way, and managers similarly deliberate the pros and cons in important business decisions; some people are even methodical in matters of the heart. But is moral algebra really the best method for decision making in today's ?
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POPSWhy Change Is So Hard Millions of us dream of transforming our lives, but few of us are able to make major changes after our 20s.
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POPS Wondeful images - 2000 years of human culture Awards competition winner -Wellcome Images is one of the world's richest and most unique collections, with themes ranging from medical and social history to contemporary healthcare and biomedical science.
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